It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that in order to improve, you need to push yourself to the max every time you lace up your running shoes, or at least every time you run on a faster session. We live in a world full of go-hard-or-go-home memes and Strava showboating. But harder sessions don't always lead to racing faster - in fact, they can often lead to burnout, injury and a lack of progress in your running.
Running is highly measurable and it requires a lot of self-confidence to not try to prove yourself in every session. One of the phrases I find myself repeating to my athletes is that your training, in particular your fast session, is supposed to get you fitter and better prepared, not to be a judgment on your fitness. But still the temptation to chase the numbers remains.
There are a few reasons why hammering every workout is likely to limit your progression. When you go all out, you're putting a lot of stress on your body and your mind. This can lead to physical and mental burnout, which can make it difficult to continue to train consistently over the longterm. Ultimately, you get fitter when you adapt to training, so the key is to get your stress dosage right. Too much stress and you won't adapt consistently.
Training smarter, not harder, can lead to better results in the long run. This means finding a sweet spot between pushing yourself hard enough to make progress, but not so hard that you're constantly on the brink of burnout. So the goal is to focus on consistently showing up and putting in a solid effort. Over time, this approach will lead to more progress than pushing yourself to the limit.
Aside from this, the majority of readers will likely be racing 5K and longer. Over these distances, your primary concern should be on developing an excellent base to your training pyramid. Yes, quality sessions are useful, but the bulk of your race-day performance will come from your accumulated easy and controlled training, not eyeballs-out sessions that don't reflect the intensity at which you'll race.
Relaxing into your easy runs and running your faster sessions with control will allow you to better adapt to your overall training and may, in time, allow you to increase your training volume, which is known to be one of the most important predictors of performance.
Of course, finding that sweet spot can be easier said than done and requires attention to how your body feels during and after workouts. You'll need to learn to control the chimp in your mind that tells you to chase the person in front, smash your splits from last week or finish on your back at the end of the last rep.
Adding some performance parameters in advance can help. For example, if you're doing an interval session, you might aim to hit a specific time for each rep. If you're doing a tempo run, you might aim to maintain a specific pace or heart rate for the duration. The key is having the discipline to stick to it. Think about your run tomorrow, and the day after. They're just as important as today's.
You want to be finishing key sessions feeling like you could complete several more efforts without losing form or hitting a wall. Working around a notional 8/10 for your harder sessions can be a good guide. If you struggle to judge effort, try using heart rate or a pacing plan for your fast sessions and long runs.
Remember, weather conditions such as heat and wind can turn a controlled pace into a redline session - adapt and be ready to slow down.
Enjoy group sessions, but remember no medals are given out for finishing first in training; save racing for the main event. If you struggle to control your competitive ego, consider training with a slightly slower group or alternating weeks with the group and weeks running solo.
This includes the speed and length of your efforts, the type and duration of recovery and the overall session volume - to create a 'stress dosage' you can recover from.
The principle can apply not just to individual workouts, but to your overall schedule as well. If you're training for a marathon, aiming to complete 80% of your workouts over the course of your training cycle, rather than battling through fatigue or illness to complete everything on your plan, can often be more productive.
Aim for a bank of easy and steady training volume, rather than one or two hard sessions a week without a good foundation of easy aerobic work around it. Recognise that your easy and steady runs play just as critical a role in your training as fast sessions.
Consider using a simple, self-scored 'stress scale' each week, scoring yourself on a scale of zero to five around muscle soreness, motivation, sleep, perceived freshness, etc. Data such as resting heart rate and heart-rate variability can also be used to support good day-to-day decisions.
Use these tools to treat your plan as an organic document that evolves rather than being a fixed set of boxes to tick, and aim to build a plan that focuses on incremental progress as opposed to big leaps.
Allow a period of two to four weeks of regeneration after a key race or following a long block of training by backing off big, high-intensity sessions.
Take care with how you include races in your training plan - they can easily become maximal efforts that are hard to recover from without a lot of self-discipline.
But what about those occasional full-on, redline workouts? Well, they can still have value for some runners, but infrequently and in moderation. These types of workouts can be valuable for a number of reasons. Ultimately, in your goal race, you might need to push to a high level of discomfort to get the result that you're looking for. Having experienced this in training can help from a mental perspective as much as physical. In addition, there's confidence to be gained from sessions that show splits and paces you haven't managed to hit before.
However, it's important to be strategic about when and how often you include these types of workouts in your training. Additionally, it's important to make sure that these types of workouts are spaced out enough that you have time to recover in between. For example, if you do a particularly challenging workout one week, you might follow it up with an easier recovery workout the following week to give your body a chance to recover and adapt. Include a redline workout only once every four to six weeks or so.
And place them sensibly, with enough space around other key sessions and long runs to recover without excess risk.
Plus environmental variables (eg, warm weather), as well as running with others, to hit higher intensities.
You can gain much of the confidence and feel of a redline session from running the majority of a workout controlled and adding one or two 'sting in the tail' efforts towards the end, building confidence but reducing impact.
The balance, consistency and cohesion of your overall plan is what counts. Don't place more importance on these workouts than they require.
Tom Craggs is a coach and road running manager for England Athletics